6 Responses to Flaneur’s Gallery: Market Day in Costa Rica

Hi Mark,
This feria (market) is every Saturday in the city, Heredia, which is about 10 miles from San Jose, the capital. This photo is one corner of a sprawling produce, fish and meat market embracing about two city blocks. One fruit and vegetable stand is equally enticing as another. More than 75% of the produce is grown within a fifteen mile radius of the market in some of richest volcanic soil in the world, similar to Hawaii’s, and the varying altitudes allow for a wide variety of produce, including some usually confined to more temperate regions. The little sodas (diners) around here serve incredible little meals with everything fresh. The central valley of Costa Rica is the macrobiotic dieter’s dream come true.

The local specialty for beans and rice is “el casado.” Almost every restaurant and local soda serves its own version, usually comprised of one meat (fish, chicken or pork), black or red beans, rice, fried platanos (plantains), a salad with vinegar and some type of vegetable. The perfect drink with a casado is a “betido,” a smoothie made with a fresh tropical fruit milk and ice. Some of the exotic fruits here can`t be found anywhere in the continental U.S., like–guanabana, tamarindo and guayaba. Over the years, Kimberly and I have tried casados in restaurants throughout Costa Rica. The most exotic (and poetic) restaurant we’ve discovered is in the mountains near the small town Turrialba. The name of the restaurant is El Posado de la luna. The owner, who is about 90 years old has been in business since the 50’s. The restaurant serves a fresh, hot corn tortilla as large and thick as a Canadian pancake. It tastes like fresh sweet corn, and you dip it in sour cream.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]